Our Bachelor Household

Portia is now off on her great adventure. She left at about 10.30 this morning.

She will be exploring her new surroundings, I exepect. She did not hide when she first arrived at the Cosy Apartment, so I don’t think she will this time. She had occasion to spend several hours at a friend’s house during an inspection of my apartment some while ago, and it did not trouble her. This will be different, however; she may expect, as then, to return here toward night-time. It will be a bit of a shock to her to realise that she will be remaining in her new setting.

Because my fosters tend to be old, diabetic or otherwise less adoptable, they tend to depart through death, so this is much better than that, of course, but the effect can be the same: I heard someone crunching hard-food and when I looked, I could see only part of a face. The lighting made it look calico, and for a moment that did not seem odd to me. I am used to seeing portly Po about the place. It’s funny how some cats’ advent cause one to wish they would be adopted soon, and cease disrupting the old routine. Then, at some point, a switch is flipped, and one hopes that if there are any inquiries about them that they prove inappropriate, and they stay. But what is best for Portia is that she stay where she is now, happy in her new abode, rather than with me.

The Cosy Apartment has become a bachelors’ establishment. It hasn’t been one since the interval between Josie’s passing and Portia’s arrival; before that, never. It feels odd, a home full of single males. I feel like I should be in a university dorm-room, looking in the refrigerator for leftover pieces of pizza from the night before, or in a boarding house run by a kindly lady we all call ‘Ma’ and who thinks of us as her ‘boys’. (The benefit of the latter scenario is that we could probably work it into a hit 1940s radio series.)

This situation may not last. I suspect that there will be another addition to the Cosy Apartment, but certainly not until I am sure that Portia has found her new place. (Of course, even then, she will be welcomed back if things go awry elsewhere.) For now, however, we guys will be free to track dirt everywhere, make irritating noises, eat sloppily and stay up all night.

Wait a minute… I think that’s been happening for about fourteen years…